Monday 22 August 2011

Finding meaning in retrospect

I have been busy this summer, too busy to visit my allotment. About a month ago I delivered a second hand hen house with the intention of enabling our daughter, who lives close to the allotment, to look after the hens for us when we are away, at the same time as the hens digging over the plot. Three days ago I called at the plot to see if there was anything to harvest. I fully expected blighted potatoes, rotten onions and broad beans past their prime. I was pleasantly surprised and gathered bagfuls of healthy aforementioned vegetables and some remarkable carrots, the best I have ever grown. The rabbit proof fencing had clearly done its job. As I was leaving I had a brief conversation with one of my allotment neighbours about his glut of courgettes and I said ‘In case you’re wondering, the hen house is our hens’ holiday home’. He replied, ‘It’s certainly had people talking’. This comment of his has stayed with me and I have realised it has relevance to my process both now and in retrospect. Since I delivered the hen house to my plot I have been feeling negligent in terms of maintenance of the plot and also in my lack of neighbourliness. However, I realise, the hen house has been working on my behalf, people have been developing narrative around it, in the form of allotment banter (which, I have learned, is unlike any other kind of conversation) because of its unexplained presence.

In reflecting on the unexpected agency of the hen house I have been reconsidering the similar agency of a caravan I acquired in 2003 with the intention of housing my MA show inside it. I was at that time exploring the notion of ‘infrasense’, a term I used to describe ungraspable, yet affective, sensations occurring as the result of finding oneself in a liminal space. I contacted the university to let them know that I would be bringing the caravan onto site but was told this would not be possible. Since I had nowhere else to store it I decided to take it there anyway and managed to park it up in the disused corner of a car park. I placed a sign in the window stating ‘This is a temporary sculpture’, to allay the institutions fears that it may belong to, or be squatted by, travellers. Some months later I was asked to move it and so I took it to the smaller car park outside the MA department and covered it with a tarpaulin to indicate that it would not be used as a residence. I finally conceded the caravan as housing for my MA work by giving it to someone who was in need of a home and who came and towed it away. In the end the space of my show consisted of a dark corridor through a storeroom that arrived into a liminal space with a light space adjacent to it, throughout all of which I layed turf. I made the caravan’s absence visible in my MA show by yellowing an area of turf the size of the caravan and hanging the key on the wall next to it.

This morning I have been reading again a conference paper, ‘A Dis-operative Turn in Contemporary Art’, delivered in Rio de Janiero in 2001, by Stephen Wright, which he concludes by saying, ‘The creative experiments carried out by contemporary artists merely sketch a horizon, stopping short of fleshing out what lies beyond and thereby setting limits to our imagination. And that, no doubt, is their use value.’ (http://www.apexart.org/conference/Wright.htm)

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